Follow the crazy adventures of an Alabama cyclist taking on the Race Across America in 2015.

Mount Cheaha Revisited 4.25x

Awesome ride today doing hill repeats out on Mount Cheaha. I managed to climb it 4.25 times (yes I turned around about a quarter of the way up to restart the climb from state highway 49 when I was not happy with how the climb was going … just a number of random things interrupting the climb that made me say “enough” let’s go try this again since it was a first ascent for me from Lake Henry on Hwy 49). Yes, with the climb from Lake Henry, I think that means I have climbed Cheaha from every conceivable direction except for the mountain bike trail. This has been an unusual year in that I have had the opportunity to ride out at Cheaha at least 3 times this year including one ride from Birmingham.

About the Strava climbing competition, this ride today gives me even greater respect for the guys out in California who do most of their climbing on longer climbs like this one. It took me almost 5 and a half hours and a lot more effort to climb the same amount that I could do in under 4 hours on the smaller climbs and rollers around Birmingham. You just never get a chance to rest on these long climbs! Give me a 500′ rolling monster with pitches of 20+% any day over a 7% climb that just goes on and on forever. Still, it’s always fun to change things up a bit with long climbs like today on Cheaha and last weekend on Clingman’s Dome and the Blue Ridge Parkway. My personal preference for now is the smaller, steeper stuff because the descents are faster and more frequent.

2 thoughts on “Mount Cheaha Revisited 4.25x”

traffic isn’t bad at all … on the road that goes through camp mac you have to watch for people cutting corners, but visibility is good this time of year so you can see and hear them from a long ways off. then once you get up to 281 (the cheaha motorway) there are a few more cars, but the road is really wide. this only really applies to the weekend, though. i would suspect there is generally close to zero traffic during the week. i rode out there on a wednesday earlier this year and saw maybe 10 cars the entire ride?